


nth time's the charm

by VacuumTan



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: 5 Times, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Romantic Comedy, F/M, Falling In Love, Getting to Know Each Other, Meet-Cute, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, no beta we die like Glenn, or at least it seems cheesy and rom com-y enough
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:48:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23741806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VacuumTan/pseuds/VacuumTan
Summary: She’s alone, dancing by herself in the middle of a public park just before noon, and she smells like a whole bottle of cheap perfume.Felix can’t help but stare.-or: the five times felix ran into annette by sheer coincidence
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic/Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Comments: 13
Kudos: 72





	nth time's the charm

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Alfax](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alfax/gifts).



**i.**

As with unfortunately many things in Felix’s life, it all starts with Dimitri.

Or, rather, Dimitri’s infuriating behaviours—above all, his lack of a spine that could put a squid to shame. Their team had decided how to go about handling a new client _weeks_ ago, had prepared everything accordingly, had put hours upon hours into getting in contact with business partners to ensure they could pull it all off without a hitch, and then someone had come up to Dimitri yesterday, asked really nicely if he could just screw over their whole schedule, which had been, _again_ , established _weeks ago_ , because they really needed the help. And the idiot, the absolute moron, had, all on his own, decided that his team would _of course_ help.

So Felix had gotten up in the middle of the meeting, gave Dimitri a few choice words, and clocked out for lunch an hour early.

Now, ten minutes later, with no appetite to speak of and twenty minutes left to his break, he finds himself sitting on a park bench, fidgety with anger and excess energy. When he gets back, he’ll probably be greeted with one of Dimitri’s lengthy apologies—not that he shouldn’t apologise, because he is definitely at fault here, but he’s also in love with the idea that he is to blame for everything, ever, so a simple ‘sorry’ usually turns into an hour-long self-flagellation session. Felix is not looking forward to that.

He gets up and stretches, sweeping his gaze over the mostly empty park. The sky is overcast, turning even the scenery sad and dreary. If he were any more upset, he’d go and kick a tree or ten, but the last remnants of his self-control deny him even that much. So he walks—briskly and aimlessly and with too much intent for someone who has no idea where he’s going.

He’s still stalking around the premises when a scent hits him. It’s flowery and vaguely familiar, similar to the perfume he’d gotten Lysithea for their Secret Santa last year, but perhaps not exactly that. It’s so surprising, still, that Felix stops in his tracks and looks around for its origin.

And its origin is... _curious_ , to say the least.

It seems to be coming from a petite woman—maybe still a girl, even—who appears to be fully immersed in a book she is silently mouthing the words to, absentmindedly moving her feet in something close to a waltz. Her orange dress, a crass contrast to the grey-in-grey weather, sways with her steps and she twirls once before turning over the page.

She’s alone, dancing by herself in the middle of a public park just before noon, and she smells like a whole bottle of cheap perfume.

Felix can’t help but stare.

And then, unfortunately, the woman stares _back_. Her eyes go wide for just one second before she stumbles, letting out a “Wah!” before her book goes flying. It lands unceremoniously on the dirt path, but at least the woman catches herself before she falls, too.

“Sorry,” Felix says, because he doesn’t exactly know what else to say, and steps forward to get the book for her. “I... uh... didn’t mean to...”

“You can’t just,” she huffs, “stand there and gawk at me.” She seems less offended than embarrassed, though, judging by how red her face is. “It’s rude! And—oh, I didn’t look too goofy, did I? I sometimes get lost in thought, and then I forget my surroundings.“

She fists a hand into her hair—ginger and slightly messy—and groans. “You’re not a bad dancer,” Felix says, and she pouts at him. He holds her book out towards her. _Loog and the Maiden of Wind_. Huh. “A medieval epic?”

“Oh, yes,” she says and takes the book back. A little smile tugs at the corners of her lips, and Felix has to fight back the reflex to smile in return. She lovingly smoothes her hand over the cover. “It’s a friend’s favourite. He let me borrow it and—oh no...”

Her hand shoots to one of the corners. “It’s dented,” she says, fingers tracing the damage. “Oh, he’s gonna be so mad.” She worries her lip, then looks back up at Felix. “He’s one of those people who will tell you it’s fine and that they’re not mad, but really, you know that you messed up, and you feel horrible for it. And then you try to make it up to them, and they appreciate it, but you also know that it’s not enough.”

Finally, she deflates with a sigh. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to...”

“It’s fine,” Felix says, looking at his feet. “ _I’m_ sorry for making you drop the book in the first place.”

The woman huffs. “Even worse, you watched me dance a jig like an idiot!” she says, but when Felix glances back up, she’s smiling. He feels his face heat up in response. “Though you said my dancing was fine, so maybe I didn’t look _that_ bad.”

“It wasn’t exactly up to ballroom standard.”

She grins. “Oh, you’re a straight-up villain!” she shouts, cheerful and just a bit too loud. Then, she gasps. “Wait, do you know what time it is?”

Felix fishes his phone from his pocket, wilfully ignoring the three missed calls from Sylvain, and reads back, “It’s just past 12.”

“Crackers!” the woman says— _crackers!_ —and pulls her book against her chest. “Uh, it was nice talking to you and all, but I really gotta—“

And then she’s rushing past Felix, almost tripping over her own feet in her mad dash, and leaves him standing right there.

He can do little but stare after her, his phone still in his hand, and he wonders what exactly just happened. His ringtone rips him out of his reverie, though, and Sylvain’s name lights up on screen. With a long suffering sigh, Felix picks up. “Yes?”

“So you do know how to pick up!” Sylvain chirps from the other side of the line. Some shuffling follows, like he’s adjusting his position, and, more worryingly, Felix can make out _sobs_ in the background. “So, we kind of have a situation on our hands here. I think Dimitri won’t rest until he can talk this out with you, so...”

Felix sighs. “Alright,” he says, giving the book-sized imprint on the ground one last look.

**ii.**

“Don’t you want to see how our dear old friend Ingrid is doing?” Sylvain asks, one arm slung around Felix’s shoulders in a friendly gesture that doubles as an inescapable chokehold. “You can just sit down and mope around in a corner, if that’s what you want.”

Felix huffs. “It’s not like I don’t want to see her,” he says, subtly trying to pry Sylvain’s arm off. “I just have better things to do with my Saturday than annoy Ingrid.” Which is an argument that probably doesn’t resonate with Sylvain, considering how it’s been one of his favourite hobbies since childhood, but Felix tries anyways.

“Well, too bad,” Sylvain says and throws open the glass door leading to the bookstore Ingrid co-owns, dragging Felix inside with him. At least he didn’t bully Dimitri into coming along this time.

Ingrid is behind the checkout counter and looks up when she hears the chimes above the door jingle. “Oh, it’s just you two,” she says flatly, and Sylvain finally, _finally_ lets go of Felix to whine at Ingrid for being _cruel_ and _not suited for customer service_ and _so rude to her oldest friends, and hey, hey, Felix, she really is, isn’t she?_

Felix tunes it out after the first three sentences and meanders off, but he feels Ingrid’s eyes burn holes into the back of his head until he ducks between two rows of bookshelves. The classics section is not exactly interesting to him, but it’s better than being stuck listening to whatever Sylvain is bothering Ingrid with.

At least their conversation has gotten quieter now.

Felix scans the titles on the spines with no particular interest, yet his eyes catch on one in particular— _Loog and the Maiden of Wind_. A bright orange dress comes to mind, and he can’t stop himself from reaching out and taking the book off the shelf.

He cracks it open, flipping through pages upon pages of needlessly wordy plot fit into neat metres. Ingrid loves these things for some reason, but she also loves feminist literature and magazines about brushing horses. And she isn’t half as bad about them as her business partner, anyways.

Felix’s half-hearted reading is interrupted when someone starts humming, maybe as close as the other side of the shelf. It’s sweet and melodic, just loud enough to be audible from a few steps away, but it doesn’t disrupt the quiet of the bookstore.

He closes and shelves the book again. The humming continues, steadily increasing in volume. Felix looks around before he decides to poke his head around the corner to peer into the next aisle.

What greets him on the other side of the shelf is a vaguely familiar mop of red hair from a few days prior. _I sometimes get lost in thought, and then I forget my surroundings,_ echoes a voice in the back of Felix’s mind that just so happens to be the humming voice’s perfect match.

Not wanting to repeat his previous offense of wordlessly staring at her, Felix clears his throat. Immediately, the woman before him goes silent, turning her head to look at him with an embarrassed flush to her cheeks. “Sorry, was I being too loud?” she asks. “Wait a second. I recognise you from somewhere.”

“In the park, the other day,” Felix supplies, and the woman lights up immediately.

“Oh, right!” she exclaims, smiling with a flush still high on her cheeks. “You saw my... dancing...” Her face falls further and further with every word before she buries it in her hands and groans. “Ugh, why is this the second time you have to come across me doing something embarrassing! My humming was probably way off-tune, too, wasn’t it?”

Felix feels like a deer in the headlights, way out of his depth. “I don’t think so?” he offers weakly, and the woman sighs. Her hands fall away from her face and she shakes her head with a wry smile.

“I swear, I’m not usually this bad,” she says, looking at the shelf in front of her to avoid looking at Felix. “But I’m not making a strong case for myself here, am I?”

“I honestly don’t care,” Felix replies. The woman freezes up, and _maybe_ that came out a bit harsher than intended. “Your dancing was fine. And your voice is... kind of nice. Not that I have much to go off, but it sounded good.”

She goes as red as her hair. Felix can relate, because he, too, is getting flustered, caught up in all this awkwardness. Normally, he would have run away from this train wreck of a conversation already, but somehow, he finds himself unable to leave. Instead, he watches as this tiny woman purses her lips, twirls her hair, and ultimately breaks out into a wide grin. “Are you sure you’re not just teasing me?” she asks, but it lacks any seriousness.

“Maybe I am,” Felix replies, and she laughs. It’s sweet—as if the sound was what her voice was made for, and as if Felix wasn’t terribly unfunny at all.

“My name’s Annette, by the way,” she says, only now turning to fully face Felix. “Might as well introduce myself if we’re just gonna keep running into each other.” She doesn’t offer her hand for a shake, but her smile is a bashful sort of inviting.

Felix clears his throat again. “Felix,” he says, and Annette’s smile brightens so much, he has to look away from it.

“That’s a nice name!” she says, maybe only conversationally, and turns back towards the shelf. Felix, for his part, is glad that she does, because his cheeks feel very warm. Unperturbed, Annette prattles on, “You see, I was looking for a book a co-worker of mine wanted to read, and I told them they’d probably have it here but—oh no.”

“What is it?” Felix barely manages to ask before Annette is scrambling out of the aisle, shaking her head.

“I forgot—I didn’t think—work!” she yells as she dashes past the checkout counter, almost crashing into Sylvain, and then out of the door. Ingrid, still behind the register, stares after her in surprise before she redirects her attention towards Felix.

“What did you say to her?” she asks, stern.

Felix frowns, because Ingrid has no right to immediately assume the worst of him, and crosses his arms. “Nothing,” he says. Ingrid narrows her eyes as if considering him and Felix scoffs. “Really.”  
  


**iii.**

“ _Why_ am I here?”

Dimitri smiles at Felix from the seat to his right. “Because we were personally invited, and it would have been rude to show up one person short, Felix,” he replies evenly, hands folded neatly in his lap. “Besides, I was under the impression you enjoyed musical performances.”

Felix decidedly looks anywhere but at Dimitri. “I do,” he concedes, watching some stage hands do some last check-ups on the equipment. It’s terribly dark in this glorified bar that only sees an audience because Sylvain’s friend Dorothea cons people into coming. “Just not like this.”

“Next time I go see an opera, I’ll make sure to bring you along, then,” Dimitri say cheerfully, tone-deaf as ever.

“Please don’t.”

The screech of a microphone back coupling interrupts whatever Dimitri wants to say next, and he recoils at the noise instead. One of the stage hands throws a sheepish smile in the direction of the still sparse audience. “Regardless, I think this concert is going to be wonderful,” Dimitri eventually says when the silence between them had just become pleasant.

Felix sighs and props his head up on one of his hands. “Maybe Dorothea oversold it,” he mutters and Dimitri chuckles in reply, just to be polite. He doesn’t believe it, of course, and neither does Felix, not really, but disagreeing with Dimitri is simply what he _does_. “She’s annoyingly confident.”

“What, am I not allowed to be?”

Felix freezes at the sing-song of a voice before a hand settles on his shoulder from behind. He cranes is neck to look at the icy smile Dorothea throws his way. “I should be honoured you came at all, shouldn’t I?” she says, giving Felix’s shoulder a squeeze that could be both, a greeting or a warning, before letting go. “But don’t worry, it’s going to be good. The band is amazing.”

“I’m certain they are,” Dimitri says, maybe to remind her he’s still there, too, before adding, “but I have no doubt that your performance will be great, too.”

Dorothea coughs into her hand to hide her laughter. “Oh, thank you,” she says, pretending to take issue with her perfectly styled hair to avoid looking at Dimitri’s overly earnest expression. Felix huffs and turns to look towards the bar where Sylvain is still chatting up the poor bartender and Ingrid, one drink in each hand, looks dangerously close to dropping them in order to drag Sylvain away by the ear.

“I’m sure you need to go prepare, don’t you?” Felix asks, turning back to Dorothea. She frowns at being shooed away like this, but probably knows not to expect much more out of him by now.

“I guess,” she says. “Tell Sylvain the bartender is taken, would you?” She stretches once, then throws him and Dimitri a quick smile and walks off in the direction of what is probably a backstage area or glorified storage room. She greets a few people along the way, and this only serves to support Felix’s theory that she ropes personal acquaintances into coming here to fill the seats.

After that, Dimitri and Felix sit mostly in silence until Ingrid and Sylvain come back with their drinks at last. It’s getting more crowded, and the band begins tuning their instruments with a few stagehands assisting them. “Why did we have to come so early?” Felix asks Sylvain, now to his left, and he shrugs.

“Dorothea said we should come around six,” he replies. “Maybe it was her idea of a prank.”

Felix scoffs. “You probably pissed her off somehow, then,” he says, and Sylvain lets out a squawk of protest before coming up short when it comes to defending himself.

Eventually, Dorothea and what Felix assumes are background singers climb the stage and take their positions behind some standing microphones. The singer furthest in the back aggressively waves at someone in the audience, and after a second, someone in the third row raises their hand to wave back. Actually, now that he’s looking more closely, that singer seems oddly familiar, and it takes Felix only another moment to realise why.

Which also happens to be the moment in which their eyes meet over five or so rows of audience.

“Hello,” Annette mouths on stage (or at least some other greeting, probably), now waving at Felix with both hands at once while looking strangely frantic about it. Felix just nods at her, and she beams before ducking back behind the other singers.

It makes something giddy and stupid rise up in Felix’s stomach, so he grips his knee with too much force and pretends to be unaffected while chugging half his drink in one go. “Easy there,” Sylvain chides him while sounding awfully close to laughter, and Felix has half a mind to dump the rest of his glass into his lap.

When the lights go dim, the audience falls silent. Dorothea, centre stage, runs a hand through her hair and puts on her best smile before greeting everyone and introducing the band. With two measures counted ahead by the drummer and otherwise very little preamble, they start into their first song.

And, well, they _are_ good. Dorothea is admittedly as skilled a singer as she makes herself out to be and maybe for that reason, Sylvain’s lovelorn puppy eyes aren’t as annoying as they could be, but Felix feels restless now. More than the front woman, he wants to hear a certain background singer.

He wants to know if Annette’s singing voice matches her humming from the other day, and what she would choose to sing if she was left to her own devices. And maybe he’s getting a bit obsessed with this, and that’s a feeling he isn’t too familiar with. It’s frustrating.

He wants to _know things_ about Annette.

The first half of the show draws to a close with Dorothea announcing that they will be taking a short break, and before Felix can stop himself, he’s already out of his seat. “Felix? Where are you going?” he hears Ingrid shout after him, but he makes a bee-line for the stage, bumping shoulders here and there as he weaves through the crowd.

When he gets to the front, he finds Annette already talking to an older man, her smile surprisingly strained. Their conversation doesn’t carry amidst the noise of all the people in the room, but if Felix had to chance a guess, he would say that the man is probably her father or uncle, judging by the greying red of his hair and the fact that he looks out of place enough to have come for Annette specifically.

Felix feels kind of stupid now, standing a few feet away from them with no idea what to say to Annette and no intention of interrupting her conversation. So he helplessly looks to the seat he vacated and the confused Dimitri and displeased Ingrid he’d left in his wake. “What the hell?” is what Ingrid mouths, probably, and he frowns. She shakes her head and says something to Dimitri who perks up and throws Felix a thumbs-up. Ingrid promptly buries her face in her hands.

“Felix?”

He _doesn’t_ jump. He really doesn’t. When he looks down at Annette, with one of her hands gently hovering over Felix’s arm, she looks like she’s holding back laughter. “Uh,” he says to her, intelligently, which only seems to amuse Annette further.

“I... uh... didn’t expect to see you here. I was so surprised earlier!” she says, smiling. Felix averts his eyes and coughs.

“A friend is friends with Dorothea, so he got us roped into coming here,” he explains, probably a bit red in the face and staring at his shoes. “I didn’t know you sang.” _I don’t really know anything about you_ , he doesn’t say.

But Annette doesn’t seem bothered in the slightest. “Oh, yes!” she says. “It’s only a side-gig for me, but... well. I mean, I don’t have the kind of voice and presence that someone like Dorothea has, but I enjoy it a lot. Being in the background is no less fun, and it’s way less pressure.”

“I’d still like to hear you sing,” Felix blurts and kind of wants to die right there. He chances a quick look up at Annette, only to see her smile with some mixture of embarrassment and happiness. She’s probably red in the cheeks, somewhere below her stage makeup.

“Oh, Felix, you just want to laugh at me,” she says, giving his shoulder a friendly shove. She’s still smiling, though. “What do you think of the show this far, by the way?”

Her segue comes out of left field, but Felix ultimately shrugs. “It’s good,” he replies, and Annette grins several kilowatts bright.

Dorothea retakes the stage before he can say anything more, and Annette scrambles off once again.

**iii.b.**

“Have you considered,” Ingrid asks, stirring creamer into her coffee, “that maybe _, just_ maybe, you have a crush?”

Felix scoffs and resents the fact that his coffee isn’t yet cold enough to chug defiantly. “Don’t be stupid. I know next to nothing about her,” he says. Ingrid gives him an unimpressed stare over the rim of her cup and takes a long sip. It’s aggravating and Ingrid _knows_ it.

“So how about you go and actually ask her to spend time with you?” she offers in her most patronising tone—the one usually reserved for Sylvain. “Annette’s a regular here, and close friends with Ashe to boot. _I_ could forward her your number.” As if to show what ‘here’ encompasses, Ingrid gestures around the mostly dark bookstore with her free hand. She follows it up by taking another demonstrative sip. “So don’t go making up excuses about not being able to get in touch.”

“No thanks,” Felix replies. “For one, because this isn’t a crush—“ Ingrid coughs a laugh, “and also because having you playing matchmaker is even worse than having Sylvain do it.”

“Alright, so not a crush,” concedes Ingrid, still sounding too bemused for Felix’s taste. “Are you trying to make a friend, then? You’re not used to not knowing people you’re close to since you were this tiny, do you?” She gestures only a few centimetres above the ground to drive her point home, grinning. “Must be hard.”

“Shut up,” Felix says and decides to screw it all and drink some of his coffee, heat be damned.

“I mean, it wouldn’t hurt you to be more sociable, either way.”

Felix sighs. “I don’t need this to turn into one of your lectures,” he says.

“Would you rather have this conversation with Sylvain, then? I’m sure he’d be _really_ happy to help you,” Ingrid says flatly, as if that thought alone didn’t trigger Felix’s fight or flight response. “He’d probably think this is his field of expertise, you know.”

“You’ve made your point, now let it go,” Felix snaps, more harshly than strictly necessary. Ingrid gives him a disapproving frown but leaves him be, instead opting to sulkily finish her coffee.

Eventually, she sets her empty cup down on the checkout counter, most likely to leave it for tomorrow. She stretches once before shooting Felix a tired smile. “Come on, I want to lock up for the day.”

Felix chugs the last bit of his now lukewarm coffee in one go and slams his cup down next to Ingrid’s with more force than necessary. “There,” he says, and Ingrid laughs.

**iv.**

It’s 4AM on a Sunday, and Felix, for some ungodly (six-foot-something, blond and clinically depressed) reason, finds himself all alone in the cheese aisle at the grocery store, trying to decide whether to get gouda or cheddar to appease the beast.

The entire place is deathly silent, save for the mind-numbing bubblegum pop playing on the radio. With some of the fluorescents overhead flickering at intervals, it all feels like a horror movie in the making. Felix swallows a lump building in his throat and grabs both cheeses, shoving them into his shopping basket with a vengeance.

Now that he’s already here, he decides to buy something for himself as well, although he has yet to figure out what he _wants_. He aimlessly walks around the snack aisles for a while, staring at fruit bars and candy as if he could actually stand the stuff. Maybe his tired mind just doesn’t recall that he dislikes sweets, he thinks after he’s maintained a solid minute of eye-contact with a cartoon parrot on a box of hard candy.

“Ooh, Mercie, I just remembered!” someone suddenly shouts, an aisle or so away, and Felix is ripped out of his trance. “I wanted you to try those sugar cookies they have here! They’re _so_ good.”

‘Mercie’ laughs in reply and their two sets of footsteps are loud as encroaching thunder in the empty store at four in the morning. Felix belatedly realises that he is still in the candy aisle, and that he’s probably going to run into the only other customers in the store right now. Bolting proves ineffectual, because the second he turns to go _anywhere_ else, he comes face to face with the one person he always runs into in the strangest places.

“Felix? What a coincidence!” Annette greets him, in a pair of kitty-patterned pyjama pants and a bomber jacket. Next to her is a woman almost a head taller in a similar state of dress, with a serene smile and her hand casually clasped around Annette’s. _Not a crush_ , insists a voice at the back of Felix’s mind when a misplaced bout of anger— _not jealousy, because this isn’t a crush_ —flares up inside him.

He coughs and shrugs one shoulder. “Yeah,” he mumbles, and Annette keeps coming closer, dragging ‘Mercie’ along with her.

“What brings you here so early?” she asks, brightly. She takes an exaggerated peek at the contents of Felix’s basket. “A sudden cheese craving? I sometimes get those, too!”

“It’s not for me,” he replies. “I’m just playing errand boy.”

Annette lets out a thoughtful hum. “Well, we still ended up running into each other! I mean, what are the odds?” She smiles before visibly recoiling. “Oh no, I forgot to,” and here, she tugs ‘Mercie’ forward, “introduce you!”

“Mercie, that’s Felix—you know, Felix, who I keep running into!” she explains. “And um, this is Mercie, my best friend in the whole wide world! And my roommate, too.”

“Mercedes. Pleased to meet you,” the taller woman says, disentangling her hand from Annette’s to offer it to Felix. The gesture is jarringly formal, but Felix shakes it on instinct. Mercedes’ hand itself is really soft while her grip is anything but. “Annie has mentioned you on occasion. It really is quite curious how you bump into each other so much.”  
  


If there’s a threat hidden behind her words, Felix has trouble telling so, if only because Mercedes’ tone is unwaveringly sweet and even. “It’s only chance meetings,” he mutters, and pulls his hand back.

“It’s actually weirder that we haven’t met before,” Annette says. “He’s friends with Ingrid—you know, the one who works with Ashe? And yet, we somehow managed to never meet. It’s so weird.”

Mercedes laughs lightly before looking at the shelves next to her. “Were you looking to buy sweets, Felix?” she asks. “Annie and I could give you some recommendations if you’d like.”

“Yes, we know our stuff! Don’t we Mercie?” Annette beams and Mercedes laughs. Felix feels like his head hurts from looking at the brightness of the two women before him for too long. Annette leans toward him. “Truth be told, Mercie is a regular patissier,” she stage-whispers.

“I don’t like sweets,” Felix replies, and watches the women’s faces fall in tandem. “I was looking for something like crackers or chips, maybe.”

“For your friend?” Mercedes asks, and he shakes his head. “Oh, I do know a great brand of chips! If you haven’t tried them yet, may I recommend them to you?”

It becomes extremely clear to Felix then that Mercedes is someone who is used to carrying conversations in a non-offensive manner. She gently guides him by the arm, steering him towards the savoury snacks opposite the sweets—and why hadn’t he been looking at those in the first place?—and plucks two bags of chips from the shelf before dumping them into Felix’s basket. He feels a bit like a little kid.

“Can we get some of those, too, Mercie?” Annette pipes up from behind them, and Mercedes smiles before getting another bag. “You’re the best!”

“Of course, Annie,” she laughs before the both of them end up staring at Felix once again. Before either of them can say anything, though, Felix’s phone goes off. The ringtone is awfully loud in the quiet store, and he frantically fumbles for it to get it to stop.

“ _What_.”

“Did you get my cheese yet?” comes a sullen Dimitri’s voice from the other end of the line. “You don’t have to, if it’s too much trouble.” Felix has to restrain himself from chucking his phone into the next aisle. Instead, he takes a deep breath, reminds himself that Dimitri is in one of his moods, and looks down at his basket.

“Not yet, but I’m already on my way to checkout,” he says, which isn’t _really_ a lie since he has no business here anymore, “and I’ll be at your place in ten minutes.” He hears Dimitri inhale as if to say something. “And _don’t_ apologise for anything right now.”

“Alright,” he says. Then, quieter, “Thank you, Felix.”

“Whatever.”

He hangs up and looks at Annette and Mercedes, who don’t even pretend to not have listened in. “I, uh, gotta go,” Felix says.

“Of course,” says Mercedes, smiling, while next to her, Annette makes a shooing motion with her hands.

“Go already, your friend needs you!” she says. “Don’t leave them hanging now! Their cheese cravings depend on you, Felix!”

“Alright, I _got_ it,” he says, and has to fight back a smile as, for once, he is the one to walk away to twin yells of _take care_!

**v.**

The Laundromat’s humming and the steady spinning of Felix’s blacks and colours inside is actually kind of hypnotic. He’s been staring at the drum tumbling his clothing around for almost ten minutes now, and he’s surprised by how meditative a state it’s left him in. The monotonous motion chases away any and all thoughts, and it’s _great_.

Someone begins loading a washing machine a few paces away, but Felix keeps staring at his clothes getting tossed.

“I’m washing my clothes today,” the other person suddenly starts _singing_ , “washing all the filth away.” They’re tapping their feet along with it, too. “Stains, and dust, and old food crusts; getting all the dirt out of my t-shirt!”

The lyrics are absolutely asinine, but the voice singing them is sweet and steady and actually kind of familiar, and when Felix looks up, sure enough, it’s Annette again. She’s swaying her hips as she stuffs her laundry into the drum, smiling cheerfully. “And when I lose another sock, this time I will know where to look, I—no, that doesn’t _really_ rhyme.”

She huffs, and Felix sees that as his chance to very casually clear his throat. Annette yelps, and whips around, probably already intending on apologising to her unintended audience when she realises who it is. “Oh no, you heard that, didn’t you?”

“I think the sock-look rhyme was okay,” Felix says, and Annette goes beet red in the face.

“No, oblique rhymes aren’t okay at all!” she insists and drops a blouse just so she can cover her face. “Ugh, I can’t believe you had to hear that! You wanted to hear me sing and now _this_ is how it happens. I swear I’m usually better than this! I’m just not warmed up!”

“It wasn’t bad,” Felix insists. Annette chances a peek at him through the gaps in her fingers. Felix feels heat rise to his own cheeks. “I mean, you have a good voice. It’s nice.”

“You’re not just saying that?”

“ _Why_ would I lie about that?” he snaps, and Annette practically flinches away from him. He coughs into his fist and pretends he doesn’t feel how much hotter his face is getting, still. “Though I would like to know where the socks go.”

Annette huffs and finally removes her hands from her face again. “You’re just teasing me now,” she says, picking up the blouse she dropped before practically slamming it into the washing machine. “If you really want to know—they get stuck in places you can’t see them a lot. Close to the rim, at the top, you name it. But this is a Laundromat, so they don’t keep them, I don’t think.”

She picks up a shirt and puts it into the drum. “I learned that the hard way. I lost one of my cutest socks here. I had to throw the other _away_ , Felix.” It sounds like a life-changing incident to her, and Felix can’t help but snort. Annette shoots him an indignant look that almost immediately melts away into a fond smile. “Mercie tried to tell me there was a type of malicious spirit that steals clothing from young women for two weeks, and eventually, I started believing it.”

Felix laughs, short and unbidden. Annette looks elated about it. “Smiling is a good look on you,” she says, eyes bright and honest. It does _something_ to Felix, and all of a sudden, he finds himself drawing a complete blank. He just stares at Annette, feels his heart hammering away in his chest, and thinks, _oh_.

_This is a crush after all._

“I need some air,” he says, sounding winded just from having the metaphorical air knocked out of him, and Annette looks worried for a second. Felix shakes his head as if to say that he’s alright and moves past her without waiting for a reply. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

He bolts from the store and walks just far enough to the side so Annette can’t see him through the glass front. He pulls his phone from his pocket and scrolls through his contacts for Sylvain’s name when he pauses, his thumb hovering an inch or so above the call icon. Maybe this isn’t the best course of action here, he thinks, moving one contact up—from Gautier to Galatea—and calling Ingrid instead.

“Felix?” she says upon picking up in lieu of a greeting. “You never call. Is something wrong?”

“You were right.”

Ingrid sighs, maybe because she realises that nothing seems to be on fire, and shifts her phone about. “I usually am.” More rustling follows. “What is this about?”

Felix exhales shakily, then forces himself into an act of nonchalance with a shrug and sheer willpower. “It is a crush,” he rushes out. “I have a stupid crush on Annette.”

“Oh, Felix,” says Ingrid, “it’s not stupid.” She refrains from assuming the tone she usually reserves for preaching and scolding, at least, Felix thinks. He almost feels like she isn’t being patronising for once. “You have nothing to lose from asking her to spend time with you. I’m sure she will agree to it.” Something shifts again and Ingrid speaks to someone in the background. “It’s not rocket science. Just be nice to her about it all.”

“As if you know anything about these things.”

Ingrid scoffs. “Who called who, again?” she shoots back, and Felix hangs up on her before she can get actually upset with him.

**v.b.**

“Are you feeling any better?” Annette asks when Felix steps back inside. She’s sitting on the bench in front of her Laundromat, back turned towards it as if she had been waiting for him. It makes Felix feel kind of bad.

“Yes,” he says. Then, “Sorry.”

Annette stands up with an almighty sigh. “You got pale all of a sudden,” she says and walks over to him. “I was worried, you know!” She doesn’t seem too angry, at least. If anything, it looks like she’s holding back a grin.

Felix mentally steels himself for what he’s about to say next. “Can I make it up to you somehow, then?”

“Like how?” Annette asks, and she sounds genuinely confused. What would Felix give for her to catch on more quickly right now.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe buy you lunch after this.”

His face is probably red as a tomato by now, judging by the heat. Annette stares at him with wide eyes and he can’t keep looking at her. “Felix, say,” she begins, slow and tentative, “are you asking me out?”

“I am.”

It’s surprising how resolutely that comes out, because Felix feels terribly out of his depth. Talking about feelings—implied or otherwise—is something he doesn’t usually _do_.

“Well, I mean, I could go for some ice cream after our laundry is done. It’s so nice out,” Annette says like it’s just any other conversation. When Felix chances at glance at her, she is almost as red in the face as when she’d realised she had been singing for an audience earlier, though. “But if you don’t care for it, that’s fine, too,” she adds, hastily.

“It’s your call,” Felix replies and actually makes an effort to maintain eye-contact. They’re both red-faced and awkward, but eventually, Annette breaks out into a bright smile.

“Alright! And until it’s done,” she says, spinning in place before dramatically flopping down on the bench, “I’ll sing you one of my more refined songs. Just to show you that I know how rhymes work!”

And as Annette drags him down by the hand to get him to sit next to her, and as she begins to sing what turns out to be an album’s worth of bizarrely themed songs, Felix realises that, maybe, he already knows a thing or two about Annette.

**Author's Note:**

> this was intended as a birthday present for al, but now i'm almost a month late bc i couldn't for the life of me finish this for some ungodly reason. it's still a birthday gift, though! just... a very belated one.
> 
> i'm not quite sure if i got felix right, but if i didn't, i hope he at least didn't come out too ooc, haha.


End file.
